INTRO

My name is Tai Curlin and I am a senior at Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon. I enjoy cross-country running, and playing chess and am interested in French language and bioengineering.

This fall, I did a series of environmental toxicology experiments looking at the possible harmful effects of mobile phones, and a few materials that are commonly found in my environment.

MY PROJECT

Experiment 1 - Many people wonder if cell phone exposure is bad for you. In this project I decided to look at whether whether cell phone exposure could cause a harmful effect on bacterial growth in culture. To do this I set up several parallel bacterial cultures in liquid medium in an incubator at 37 degrees Celcius for two hours. During the incubation, I exposed the samples to an active cell phone at close range for varying periods of time. I was expecting to see either nothing, or maybe a harmful effect on bacterial growth at longer exposure times….

Commentary - I was not really expecting this interesting result. I am still thinking about why this happened (the cell phone seemed to help bacterial growth, but only if exposed for a short time). I am planning more experiments to eliminate some possible confounding variables, like agitation of the sample during removal to the Faraday cage, and short-term temperature effects. TBC…

Experiment 2 - In another experiment, I exposed the bacteria to some substances that people worry might be toxic. The three things I chose were charred red meat (common in our diets), the rubber infill in sport turf fields (which is basically ground up tires), and dust from railroad ties which have been treated with creosote (which sometimes show up in gardens and playgrounds).